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IBM down but not out in enterprise storage

It's a claim heard with the previous release of IBM's Shark line. EMC and Hitachi own the enterprise storage market after IBM largely ignored the business opportunity there. Three years ago, IBM decided to fight back and regain some ground on its rivals. After all, if you're already selling multimillion dollar servers to banks and the like, you might as well pick up another couple of million from their storage needs. The Shark line failed utterly due largely to bad timing and a few missing features. Still based on the aging Serial Storage Architecture rather than Fibre Channel, IBM has announced a larger, meaner shark with a few extra teeth. CNET has a surprisingly in-depth (for CNET anyways) article on the new storage systems, detailing the next evolution of what IBM hopes will be the ultimate predator in the enterprise storage market.

Most important of these changes is the addition of RAID 10. RAID 10 provides both mirroring and striping across the larger 36GB drives in the Shark servers. IBM also added some automation technology that allows the machines to repair some of their own problems on the fly without the intervention of technicians. This last development interests me because it saves time that can otherwise be better spent by IT professionals as they surf Ars Technica. Expanded caching rounds out the last of the major changes, but the marketing branch of EMC is less than terrified.

"It appears they've made only extremely minor changes, and they've ignored areas where the product continues to have major issues," said Ken Steinhardt, director of technology analysis for EMC. For instance, he criticized the IBM design for lacking sufficient memory protection to keep up with high-data traffic.

"What we have on our hands here is a dead shark"

It does appear that the majority of the changes, while bringing some much needed features to the Shark lineup, are merely catch-up to what Hitachi and EMC already offer.